Audiophile Priorities and Recent Topics

@unreceiveddogma  

Which would you choose?
$2000 on a room treatment for 25% improvement $2000 on cables for at best 5% improvement

Agreed on this example.  It strikes me that your focus would only shift to tweaks when you feel that you've done all you could in every other area of priority first.  What really got me motivated to start the thread was the premise posited by a few members who seemed to give a disproportionately large level of priority to areas that I thought would be the absolute last areas to focus on.  Seems many others agree.

Much appreciated...and cool website!

Three_easy_payments :

thx for the website shout out.

As inferred before, I built around a low cost, tube analog approach. As to speaker/amp synergy:

I started with the Dyna and a pair of Lafayette speakers. Moved up to a pair of Dyna MK IIIs, then Hafler mono blocs which were crap, back to the MK IIIs. Moved to a pair of Warfdales, then Altec 604Cs (1978), then the Futterman (1985), then Duntechs. The Duntechs and the Futtermans destroyed each other. Repaired the Futtermans, ditched the Duntechs, back to the 604Cs.

I recently had the Futtermans rebuilt by Jon Specter as triodes. He put in all new Jensen audio grade foil oil caps. I rebuild the 604s every 10 years. I asked Specter if I should change the impedance from 16 to 8, he said leave ‘em at 16, the Futtermans love efficiency. The Futtermans have been stable for 8 years now.

I started with building around the Dynas, got the 604Cs, loved ‘em, got the Futtermans and the Duntechs disaster led me to realize that the Altec/Futterman combo was a match made in heaven.

I know that Futterman/Quad is the classic combo, but I never liked the Quads.

I experimented with about a dozen cables in the 1990s/early 00s. To the extent that I heard a difference, I wondered if I was trying to hard to hear it. I should not have to make an effort to hear anything at $200 to $2000 per pair. Sorry! A waste of $s imho.

The only tweaks that I have done that made a difference is bolting the cabinet to a brick wall that the table sits on, and putting the Velodyne sub on springy rubber feet. That second one strikes me as counterintuitive but I guess that decoupling the sub from the building trumps resistance to movement: until then, the sub was turning the entire 3.5 story building into a subwoofer.

@unrecievedogma is a gem of a dude. i had a great conversation w him the other day. Love his website and giving back thru Vinyl Sunday, a global thing….

Out of curiosity I took a quick look at Robert Harley's well-known book "The Complete Guide to High-End Audio" to see what his guidance was on tweaks.  He discusses them in Chapter 15 (out of 16).  He indicates that these items can be used to address an "audiophiles' need to squeeze out those last bits of musical performance out of their systems."  He also says that you should not even think about these items before making sure you have optimized speaker positioning  and room acoustics first and having first built a solid foundation.

A few quotes I found interesting, while he did acknowledge that some accessories can certainly make improvements:

Other accessories can not only fail to improve the sound, but can actually degrade it. To make matters even more complicated, many accessories are completely worthless - nothing more than snake oil sold by less-than-honest promoters that have no effect on sound. 

Listen before you buy

It seems that Harley's priorities align well with mine and many others that have posted in this thread.  It's interesting that the Editor-in-Chief of The Absolute Sound used the term "snake oil".  I honestly didn't expect that.

Three_easy_payments:

”…many accessories are completely worthless…”

does he offer examples?